Dora had sat listless and silent in the chair in her bedroom while Uncle Otto saw to his patients in the room below. Once her hair had grown, Uncle Otto organised a stylist from John Barnes in the Finchley Road to come to the house. He used his clothing rations and bought her some frocks and a pair of shoes. He bought her powder and lipstick, Yardley’s Natural Rose. Even then, she didn’t feel she had a woman’s face, not yet.

‘You should get out, Doralein. It’s not good to brood like this.’

She’d forgotten how to go to a shop, buy cigarettes, soap.

They sat in the sitting room in the evenings, she, curled like a baby, while he held her hand and stroked her fingers and they listened to a play or a concert on the wireless.

‘A funny thing happened today,’ he’d say. He couldn’t tell a story, but he loved a joke. ‘You’d have laughed, if you’d been there.’

You have to laugh. But inside. You laugh inside.

He’d tell her how he came to London and had to live off charity, renting the basement flat and taking his medical exams again even though he had been a practising doctor for fifteen years.

‘People were generous.’ His voice had a catch in it. ‘But British bureaucracy was icy. Unforgiving. They made life hard for us. Refugees? You’d think we were criminals. Beggars and idlers. Here to live off public assistance…’

She’d heard his story many times. Uncle Otto needed to talk, to get it off his chest. Now, Dora wondered whether he wasn’t trying to get her to do the same. Would it have made a difference?

‘I was the lucky one. The Board of Deputies guaranteed me. Did you know you needed a sponsor? Who had that kind of money?’

And now look at me.

He’d tell her how he bought the house in Fitzjohn’s Avenue, only he called it ‘FitzJews Avenue’. ‘The whole house, with a sitting tenant on every floor.’

He’d been too old to fight when they released him from the internment camp, and doctors were needed in London. Some other poor refugee was now living in the basement with the curling linoleum and mouldy bathroom.

‘Enough of this,’ he’d say. ‘We are alive. Gott sei dank.’

Dora listened, absorbing his story so it became her own too. She was a refugee. Dispossessed and disconnected. What more need she say? The things that had happened, those things, were best not spoken about. Last heard of in 1943. That’s what that Hummel woman said. She positioned the fork and pressed it into the soil, levering out the roots of the sycamore. Gott sei dank.

How long had it taken her to leave the house when she’d come back from the war? Several months, for sure.